Well if you saw my last few Twitter posts... you know that I don't like windows... and if you've been following my twitter posts... you'll know that I replaced my Desktop with a n EeePC. (surprisingly... I never did a review/unboxing of my EeePC like I did for my wife's Acer Aspire one).
Anyways... so some history... late last year my desktop computer of 5 years, running Ubuntu linux, died... I mean really died, the powersupply died and fried the motherboard in the process. So... I went without a computer and depended on my work provided MacBook Pro for a bit... but I've never liked depending on hardware provided by others... So I start a replacement search... initally I was planning on simply rebuilding my desktop, but when Lauren decided she was taking the Acer Aspire One with her to Vietnam.... it meant I needed a portable computer solution. Being that the MacBook is work's and work is US Gov't... something told me I wasn't taking it it with me out of the country and not Vietnam. So I needed a notebook... I like the Acer I got for Lauren, but I wanted a bigger screen. Acer's 10inch was not yet release and I was running out of time so I selected the Asus EeePC... the 1000HA with XP and 160GB harddrive, plus I up'd the RAM to 2 GB. So there you have the specs...
So why windows you ask? well I couldn't get the 160GB hard drive with Linux, well I couldn't find it. So job 1: install linux. Deciding on an Ubuntu variant was not a big decision, I've been using Ubuntu for years. the challenge was that I wanted to keep the windows partition. Furtunately the EeePC comes preinstalled with 2 partitions (3 in reality, but I'll get to that later). So Using gparted on a Live linux USB, I resized the 2 partitions to shrink the Windows partition to about 40GB, and setup LVM on the remaining partion. Then I installed linux.
So now I have linux... and I had windows... and why I kept windows, well I wanted to be able to watch Netflix and to-date they still don't have a linux client. Plus I play World of Warcraft, and while it plays fine with Wine and Crossover, it updates a lot faster native in Windows. So my hope was to move the Windows partitoni to a Virtual Machine, but that failed... and in reality a reboot is not that critical especially since Hibernate now works on Ubuntu 8.10....
Now that the basic history has been discussed... so now to what happened... I've basically been using my Eee solely in Windows, but the other day (while in Vietnam) I wanted to watch a video so I booted up Windows, downloaded, and watched... rebooted in Linux and was done. Then on Sunday (almost 3 weeks since my last boot into Windows) I launched Windows to watch a show and well... I noticed that my browser had been Hijacked... and not just Firefox... also IE... and basically everything... my virus scanner started complaining that it was not installed correctly and everything started acting weird.
I tried a few Malware removers, but as you can guess since I was already hijacked, they didn't work... so the solution: reformat and reinstall. Argh a "reformat"... well then I remembered something about a hidden partition on the Eee... are restore partition... also in the process of multiple reboots trying to fix the problem, I kept noticing an additional boot option in GRUB. So I booted and was prompted with a screen warning of a complete loss.... (fear).... I quickly canceled out, and checked the 'backup' status of my Linux partition.
So..... then I reboot and ran the restore tool. to my surprise and joy, it only replaced the install on drive C which also happened to be the first partition, plus since I used GParted to resize the partion, it left the partition starting at the same place on the disk and again to my joy, my linux partition wasn't touched. Hence my liking my EeePC more today.
well sorry about my ramble... I'm just happy that all looks to be better with mininal interuption to me... not I just need to finish the Windows updating on the restore system and install my protection and move on.
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